kmlevitt

If they are as competent at their jobs as they think they are all the dumb, blind investment going on around them should just help them out.

>” That suggests a strong, long-term Iranian focus on strengthening Houthi anti-ship capabilities and a potential attempt to export Iran’s model of naval coercion from the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to the geopolitically important Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait.”

Can anyone who understands this conflict explain this more? What does Iran get out of helping the Houthi disrupt commercial shipping? For that matter, how do they benefit from naval coercion in the Gulf?

>What I saw this as was a group of people who had real concerns about Altman's leadership, and some of those concerns ended up sounding pretty valid, but who didn't have the experience/maturity to understand how to go about the next step.

That and that alone is enough to question their competence, though. The impression I get is that Toner has been in the academic/nonprofit world for so long that she doesn't understand how the real world works. In those places, the sad truth is nothing you really do is of much consequence to anybody in the grand scheme of things, other than you collecting prestige and a paycheck.

Then she tried making a consequential decision in an organization valued at around $90 billion, and lo and behold, people started caring about her actions in a way she has never experienced before.

You need to teach it what kind of stuff you like. If you go on Twitter and look at peoples’ bios, they often list their blue sky handles. Start following tech journalists such as https://bsky.app/profile/gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

Then, peek into their own “following“ lists, and follow everybody you recognize/like.

Then go into their “following” lists, and do the same. Rinse and repeat.

Eventually, the algorithm will take the hint and start recommending you more tech stuff.

I think I’ve figured out what he’s doing. He knows Twitter is going to flop due to its tremendous debt, dwindling audience and the failure of his paid premium subscription scheme.

But this way, when it happens he gets to blame all of that on “woke corporations“, rather than on himself.

Pretty confusing considering he actually is getting a literal judge involved in this right now.

Many of us might feel that way internally or in private when we’re frustrated, but few would go up on stage, say that in front of the whole world and wait for applause afterward. Regardless of his political opinions or personal temperament, he seems to have lost touch with reality.

The scary thing is he got an extremely pro Trump judge in Texas, who is famous for making nonsensical rulings that even the current Supreme Court heavily disagrees with. So there’s a good chance he will win this and it will drag out in court for ages, despite the fact they are very obviously protected by the facts of the matter and the first amendment.

The argument is that you had to press refresh on your browser several times before a neo-Nazi post coincidentally lined up with an ad from Disney, and media matters just kept on doing it until they got the desired result. But aside from that, Musk isn’t even disputing it happens.

Bluesky is pretty lively and active considering how slow they roll out invites. Closest thing I’ve seen to a credible Twitter replacement so far. Lots of good accounts have already migrated there.

He seems to contradict himself. On one hand he says “fuck you“ to anybody pulling advertising like he’s throwing caution to the wind because he just doesn’t care, but on the other hand, he says the company is doomed if advertisers pull out, and that seems to really upset him.

So… Twitter is shutting down? There’s really no other plan other than blaming advertisers for pulling out, and ranting about how earth will judge them?

The Sorkin guy said maybe advertisers don’t want to be associated with it, and he said “let’s see what the courts say“.

So he’s going to sue people for not advertising with him? How can anyone who says this kind of thing claim to believe in free markets, libertarianism or capitalism?

This is true. But we are also up in terms of page views per month, unique visitors, etc., etc. reddit has probably been getting gradually bigger each year for as long as I can remember, and it doesn’t look like that trend has peaked off yet. At least not the subs I have access to.

At the end of the day it comes down to the upvotes, though. If the other users are on your wavelength, you’ll probably like whatever they recommend. But over time you could have less in common with the average user there, meaning what they upvote will be less relevant to you too.

>People don't want low end housing built in their neighborhoods.

The problem with this reasoning is that housing has gotten so expensive in many cities that anything that costs less than $750,000 can be considered "low end".

Polls show that most people want more housing built. The problem is homeowners don't want it built in their neighborhood. Everyone wants to pass the buck to somewhere else.

That's why it's no longer possible for residential zoning to be determined on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. States have to step up and come up with minimum zoning that reflects the state's larger interests rather than letting every block fight to "preserve" a historic gas station etc.

I'm on reddit a lot less these days, but subjectively it seems about the same for me, except most of the old subreddits I'm a legacy mod on are way busier than I remember. They're definitely still gaining users.

It could just be that the longer you're on there, the worse the quality appears to get to you as newcomers come. People always start to feel that way after being there some time. But then again people have been complaining about the quality of reddit going down literally almost as long as reddit has existed.

Only now are we starting to see actual democratic referendums on these topics. For a long time everybody was brainwashed into thinking more construction = “greedy developers”, so nobody treated adding to supply as a possible solution.

But the tide is starting to turn, and in a lot of state/provinces you are starting to see real change it last. British Columbia will soon up zone province-wide for example. And slowly you are starting to see some good initiatives passing in California.

In practice, the people that block new housing in the neighbourhood are a handful of crotchety retirees that go to the community meeting and raise a fuss. Most people can’t do that because they have more important things to do all day.

But we know the very vocal opposers don’t represent the true majority because of polling on the issue. For example most people in the Bay Area want to see more construction. And the younger people are and the more they rent, the more in favor they are of it.

Japan is a pointless comparison. Their reluctance to expand immigration has nothing to do with their reasonable zoning policies. People try to bash something they got right by bringing up irrelevant things they get wrong.

Your first proposed solution will do the trick just fine. For a long time, NIMBYS pretended that increases in supply of housing would have no effect on rising prices (or worse, somehow raise them!) by labeling it “gentrification”. Now that that argument is defeated, they warn of a crash. But realistically aggressive zoning would probably just slow the rise of prices and modestly decrease them rather than cause a dramatic crash. We know this from the examples of Auckland, New Zealand and Minneapolis.

This is such a cop out response. Even if we want to pretend there are no other investments, the real question is why don’t we just upzone cities end build more housing instead of artificially constricting supply so the baby boomers can get rich off the younger generations.

Yeah if their AI commenting is all that good/convincing they should get out of social media and start the next trillion dollar company.

I don’t go on Reddit that much anymore and I haven’t been active as a mod on that sub for a very long time. But based on my experience doing it, users are quite good at identifying stupid bullshit and reporting it to mods, which makes it easy to spot. Plus they downvote low quality comments like crazy so it gets buried and people don’t even see it.

Because of those things Prank spammers usually don’t last long. Usually a small gang of people will try something like that and you can quickly ban them. They might try to come back on new accounts but eventually tire of it and find another way to keep themselves busy. The mod queue feature is quite efficient so we can ban reported junk much faster than they can post.

I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but it would be more difficult than you might think. If you try to automated completely it would cost you an awful lot in fees (Open AI’s server bills are “eye-watering“ and if you go past the free limit they start passing that cost onto you), and the admin’s would probably be able to identify the accounts doing it and ban them site wide.

Yes, still. I’m a mod on a few other decent sized subs (30k-ish) actually and most of them are still growing, unless the topic at hand is clearly outdated.

Wouldn’t those same people just do the same thing everywhere on social media across the Internet though? Because if so it’s still doing well in the relative rankings.

It's one thing to add stories to a startup website and created the illusion of a couple dozen users instead of just zero. But all these years later Reddit has millions and millions of unique users per month and is still one of the top ten most visited websites in the US and has been for many years, beat out only by google/meta properties and wikipedia etc. You can fake "activity" internally but it's harder to fake stats calculated by independent evaluators.

And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?

>Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is

Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference?

The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.

I still have mod status on a large-ish (70k+) subreddit so I can view reddit's internal traffic statistics for it, and these estimates are definitely wrong.

These stats claim the sub has had 10-20 comments per day in just the past month, so maybe 300-600 tops.

In reality it's had 1200+ comments just in the past week alone and probably closer to 5000 for the month. And you can see the activity with your own eyes in every thread, so I definitely trust reddit's own stats more.

So to be clear, There is no evidence that the SEC takes this seriously at all or is anywhere near conducting an investigation. That’s just what redditors hope will happen, but the reasoning doesn’t seem very strong.

Given the value of Microsoft’s investment in open AI, and given the fact that the value of open AI lies in the employees capable of delivering the technology Microsoft gets from them, it is absolutely rational for Nadella to offer all of them jobs in the event they leave open AI for whatever reason, no “favor trading“ required.

Benioff of salesforce and the CEO of Nvidia were also very publicly offering those same people jobs with no interview. Are they guilty of “favor trading“ too? Or can we just accept that everybody in Silicon Valley wants to hire Altman and his people?

My guess is some people on WallStreetbets are just trying to short Microsoft stock, and they’re hoping if they talk this talk they’ll get the ball rolling on a drop in their share price.

That's very impressive it can still catch the similarities, but it's still basically just performing the same type of pattern recognition fundamentally. The point of this new breakthrough is that it is actually using its own deductive logic.

Saw a video of Altman talking about this progress. The argument was basically that this is a big leap on theoretical grounds. Although it might seem trivial to laymen that it can do some grade school math now, it shows that it can come up with a single answer to a problem rather than just running its mouth and spouting plausible-sounding BS like GPT does.

Once they have a system capable of settling on a single correct answer through its own reasoning rather than yet another probability, it it gets much easier to build better and better AI with a series of incremental improvements. Without this milestone they might've just kept on building LLM's all with the same fundamental limitations, no matter how much computing power they add to them.